


Tonight Will Be Fine

by arcadia75



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fertility Issues, Fertility Treatment, Infertility, Merry Month of Cohen, POV First Person, Post-Endgame, References to Depression, not relaunch book compliant, realities of marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-17 05:17:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18958636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcadia75/pseuds/arcadia75
Summary: Life doesn't always give you what you want.





	Tonight Will Be Fine

**Author's Note:**

> My humble thanks to @curator-on-ao3 who beta read this for me several times and provided invaluable feedback and encouragement.

But I know from your eyes

And I know from your smile

That tonight will be fine,

Will be fine, will be fine, will be fine

For a while.

\--Leonard Cohen

 

 

I’ve stepped out on the terrace for a little fresh air.  The party has been lovely, and Gretchen kept to Kathryn’s and my request to keep it small, but I just needed to get away for while.  This evening of family and friends toasting us with best wishes on our tenth wedding anniversary and sharing stories about our perfect marriage shows it’s easy to see what you want to see from the outside. Much of my life with Kathryn has been far from perfect.

After _Voyager_ returned so unexpectedly to Earth, after the debriefings and celebrations, after my short-lived relationship with Seven, Kathryn and I went our separate ways.  There was no drama, no drawn-out goodbyes. After seven years, we both were tired. Tired of being responsible for so many people, tired of having forgotten our individual needs.  I left Earth and visited my sister for while on Trebus, reconnected with my roots and heritage. As far as I knew, Kathryn went home to Indiana.

I made it clear I had no interest in active duty aboard a starship, so Starfleet offered me a position at the Academy. It was fulfilling to be able to to reconnect with many of the _Voyager_ crew without the specter of life and death hanging over our heads.  I honestly didn’t think much about Kathryn those first few months on Earth.  It was satisfying to find myself and nurture my own interests. Tom and B’Elanna told me Kathryn turned down a promotion to admiral and turned down command of another starship to take a position in the Starfleet science division studying all the data we had brought back from the Delta Quadrant.  I had every intention of calling Kathryn and seeing if she wanted to reconnect over coffee, but the semester got into full swing, and I just never made the time. Then, my department chair asked me to participate in a special seminar for fourth-year cadets about improvising with limited resources.  Kathryn also would be participating along with B’Elanna and a few captains who had fought in the Dominion War.

We all met the day before the event to compare notes. It was the first time I had seen Kathryn in almost six months.  I had no idea what to expect. She surprised me by embracing me warmly, saying how much she missed me and how happy she was to see me.  The group planned some talking points for the next day and dispersed for the night. Kathryn asked if I wanted to get coffee, so we found a cafe a couple of blocks way. We kept the conversation light at first, what we had both been doing over the past six months, how our families were, how much had changed on Earth in the seven years we had been away.  Then we started talking about _Voyager_ . We talked about our fight over the Borg, our disagreements about the _Equinox_ , how guilty I felt taking her away from Jaffen, losing Joe Carey and many of the other crew, my relationship with Seven, how we felt about our time on New Earth.  She told me she regretted never allowing us to talk openly about our feelings for each other while we were on the ship. I smiled and told her there was plenty of time now.  Our first official date was the Friday night after the Starfleet seminar. Three months later was our small wedding in Indiana, with just families in attendance. Kathryn insisted she didn’t want a big celebration, but our _Voyager_ family certainly threw us one on the first anniversary of _Voyager's_ return, once the word of our marriage got out.

Our first years together where almost exactly how I imagined them when I allowed myself to indulge in those fantasies when we were on _Voyager_.  Kathryn would surprise me at my office with picnic lunches, we spent vacations exploring Earth and other planets, holidays were with family. Sex was fantastic. After practically seven years of celibacy for both of us, being able to make love whenever we wanted was freeing.   We bought a beautiful house in Sausalito that had floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of Richardson Bay and the mountains. There was space for a garden, for guests, and for future family.

Around our second anniversary, Kathryn and I started seriously talking about having children.  I has just turned fifty, and while certainly there have been older first-time fathers, if we were going to have children I didn’t want to wait much longer. Kathryn and I enthusiastically threw ourselves into the trying part of trying to conceive.  Six months passed with no success, and we decided to go see the Doctor. He put us through a battery of tests, but couldn’t find a conclusive problem. He gave us a medical tricorder and showed us how to track her hormones and pinpoint exactly when Kathryn was ovulating, suggested we time sex around certain readings and levels and try for another six months.  Sex on a schedule started to take a toll on our relationship. It didn’t matter if we were tired, or just not in the mood, if the tricorder said go, we did. It was a task we had to accomplish, no longer fun or spontaneous.

Just after our third anniversary, we endured another uncomfortable appointment with the Doctor and another round of tests.  I hoped I was the problem, that maybe some genetic anomaly like my crazy gene was preventing us from conceiving. Every month she didn’t get pregnant I could see Kathryn retreat further into herself, being weighed down by a guilt that this was somehow her fault.

The Doctor started us on a protocol that required six different hyposprays of three different drugs, timed precisely throughout the day.  Kathryn stayed on that for ten days, then added a fourth drug. All the while, she had to report to Starfleet Medical every other day so the Doctor could monitor her follicular growth to determine the optimum time to retrieve the eggs and fertilize them.  The first few months, I went with Kathryn to every appointment, but soon she said she wanted to go alone and I just showed up when it was time to provide my sperm sample. After the first few embarrassing months, I was numb to the cold, sterile rooms the medical facility provided for men to use to provide their contribution.  They offered lots of stimulation should a man need it, holo-characters, photo padds, audio recordings. I never used any of that, thinking of Kathryn was usually enough, and as time went on, I got very adept at getting in and out of that room as quickly as possible.

Month after month, we had no success.  Kathryn withdrew into herself even further, and we rarely talked about anything other than the next step on this path to have children.  More than once I found her in our home office well after midnight researching some new fertility drug combination or procedure. It was like New Earth all over again: she was convinced she could find an answer with science.  The drugs were taking a physical toll on her body as well. She put on weight; not a lot, but noticeable. She was, of course, still beautiful to me, but gone were the sexy lingerie of our early marriage and the stylish, form-fitting civilian clothes she wore when not in uniform.  

For almost four years we were stuck in this limbo of living a life of doctor appointments, medical procedures and balancing all of that with our careers.  A year into our journey, I suggested that one or both of us take a leave of absence from Starfleet to at least ease one point of demands on our time, but Kathryn said she didn’t want either of us to abandon their career.  Three years into the journey, the Doctor tried to convince us to try more alternative methods of creating a family: donor eggs or sperm or a gestational carrier. Growing up in my tribe with so many aunts and uncles and cousins that were never a blood relation to me, I knew there were many different ways to make a family, but Kathryn didn’t want any of those alternatives.  I also tried to broach the subject of adoption, or even remaining childfree with her, but she always shut down those topics quickly. I never understood her reluctance to these options and when I would try to press her more, she would continue to isolate herself and shut me out. I just stopped bringing up different paths we could take after a while. Creating a child, life, should have been bringing us closer together, and we were drifting further and further apart.

Every year at the _Voyager_ anniversary party, as more and more children were born to our former crew, we got the inevitable question of when we might have a little captain or commander of our own.  It was easy to laugh at the question in those early years, joke that we had enough of being parents to all of the crew. But, as the years went on, she and I would debate how to handle the question.  I wanted to be honest with our friends, our family, that we were struggling to conceive, it wasn’t something to be ashamed about. Kathryn felt it was a private matter and wanted to keep it that way.   As the eighth anniversary of _Voyager’s_ return approached, Kathryn broke down one night over dinner and said she couldn’t go through any more treatment, that she wanted to stop trying to have a baby.  I was sad, but also felt a weight lifted. I knew she had to come to this decision on her own. I had tried to make it clear to her over the years that as much as I would have loved to be a father and to raise children with her, she was my family.  I just held her as she cried and tried to apologize for not being able give me a family. We decided that this year, if we were asked when we were finally going to have children, we would be honest with people: that while we had hoped to have a family, and had been attempting to for a number of years, even with medical assistance, it didn’t work out for us.  

Life moved on after that.  Kathryn finally accepted a promotion to Admiral, and is occasionally off planet for diplomatic missions. Sometimes I’ll accompany her if classes are not in session, but I have my own responsibilities since becoming chair of my department.   In between our career responsibilities, we’ve started to reconnect as a couple again, but it’s been difficult. We’ve tried to get back the physical intimacy we had at the beginning of our relationship. After so many years of sex on a schedule or having to abstain because of treatment schedules, we’ve lost the carefreeness we used to have. Kathryn is still self-conscious about her body after almost six years of invasive medical procedures and doesn’t always like to be touched.  And even though we aren’t expecting or trying to get pregnant, every time we make love there is still that small voice in the back of our minds that says miracles can happen.

I close the doors of the terrace behind me as I go back inside the restaurant, and catch Kathryn’s eye from across the room.  She smiles, a little questioningly, probably wondering where I ran off to and I see in her eyes all the same things I’m feeling.  Love first, always love. Some sorrow that these ten years were not the bliss we dreamed of, trepidation that we’re never going to find that togetherness and ease we had at the start of our marriage, grief for the family we don’t have, yet thankfulness for the family we do, faith that everything will be alright in the end.  Because despite everything, we’re here together, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted. That’s enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was not the story I intended to write when I picked this song. But perhaps it was a story I needed to write. My thoughts and love to anyone who has or is currently walking this journey.


End file.
